Cycle of Nemesis Read Free Page A

and truly, disappeared before my eyes.
    Inevitably, the more I thought about it the more rationality supervened. I had imagined his vanishment and some normal explanation accounted for the experience.
    So it was that the next morning—the third of my stay with George Pomfret—I hurried over breakfast and with a quantity of sly digs at George induced him also to hurry so that we could heli to Gannets before the odious Benenson could show up.
    Feeling only a slight quickening of excitement as we dropped down to the rambling and picturesque house, I still could not help wondering what was going to happen today.
    The place looked unchanged from the outside and I found both a comfort and a normalcy in this; for almost a thousand years the house had stood here while motorways and monorails had passed on either side, while the high sonic booms of aircraft had drifted down from above and the deep entrails of the intercontinental subway systems had penetrated the ground far below. Macabre and pitiful as was the death and mutilation of a young girl, this house must have witnessed other and more frightful scenes in its long and shrouded history.
    George Pomfret, strangely enough, had thrown off my questions about Lester Northrop. “He wasn’t the fellow they’re talking about; he only lived here. Fellow you want to know about was old Vasil Stannard.”
    “Vasil Stannard?”
    “Yes, well, kept himself to himself. That portrait up at Gannets, artist who painted that had to live in up there, own suite of rooms, own robots, not allowed to prowl about the house.” Pomfret chuckled fatly. “I confess I wouldn’t have missed the auction even if Benenson hadn’t asked me into the syndicate, for the sake of poking about in Gannets. Regular mystery house, y’know, has been for years.”
    We alighted from the heli, seeing only two others already there in the rapidly-organized carpark, and walked up the scrunching yellow gravel paths past the trimmed box hedges and the weathered statues, noseless, armless and lichened. The day held all that subtle saffron clearness of promise that you find only early on summer days, when the whole world seems to be contained within itself, idling, waiting for the machinery of life to move into top gear, watching and listening and absorbing the promise. Always that, the promise, what is to come, the expected, the awaited; always that, so much better, really, than the blowsy blown fulfillment.
    The blue roofs floated against the sky. I had never really thought about the color of roofs before and I suppose if asked would have vaguely said something about the warmth of red roofs, the vibrant glow of orange gables, the luster of tiles. But now, walking between tended beds of early summer flowers rioting in color and perfume, I saw clearly that here, if nowhere else, blue roofs and gray and yellow walls formed the most perfect example of domestic architecture. They reminded me of my own silver sky back home.
    In another place and another time, I would have preferred red brick and red tiles. But not here. Not at Gannets.
    We went through the glassed-in portico and the anterior lobbies and walked directly to the ballroom. Pomfret could not wait to clap his eyes on his Aphrodite. Outside, the regular estate guards with their brown uniforms and holstered sidearms had been joined overnight by the more somber police, keeping their own watch on this place. If anyone had had the idea of stealing any of the fabulous Gannets collection, the guards effectively prevented the idea’s execution.
    I hesitated on the threshold of the ballroom, again fascinated by my feelings that this beautifully proportioned room should resound with the lilting waltz tunes and the swirling skirts and brilliant uniforms of a bygone era. The musicians’ gallery with its carved balustrade and cunningly modernized lighting hovered above one wall as though on antigravs—and then I felt an irregular thump clot my heartbeat and I gasped.
    I